According to reports appearing on Florida Today , Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC ) has laid off employees who were working on the company’s offering under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP ), the Dream Chaser space plane. SNC has also stated that it will continue to develop the spacecraft for possible use with other nations’ human-rated space programs and that it has issued a protest over NASA’s selection of Boeing’s CST-100 space taxi and Space Exploration Technologies’ (SpaceX ) Dragon V2 spacecraft.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has until Jan. 5 to respond to SNC’s protest. Meanwhile, the Colorado-based company has decided to let some 9 percent of the workforce that SNC hired to produce the Dream Chaser. According to Florida Today, SNC’s staff in its Space Systems branch has increas...